Rendering in stud.io

[Sentinel]

I trying to make an animated render for a ~200 part build, and it says it’s going to take 3+ hours, should it take that long?

[SaperPL]

The default rendering quality settings is set to 128 samples per pixel and you don't need such high quality. See for yourself what level is okay for you, 16 or even 8 samples per pixel may be okay, you just need to check that. It's just that the shadows and reflections may look sharper/more fake.

[aFrInaTi0n]

It depends on several aspects:

• Selection of rendering on CPU or GPU (gpu ponly possible with NVidia graphic cards)
• Hardware being used
• Used Rendering Engine (POV or eyeSight/cycles)
• Quality settings of the render (Sample size)
• Parts with special materials/surfaces (transparent, luminous, metallic, chrome color types)

To give some examples (out of my memory, may not be accurate), main components were the same (Ryzen 5 3600x at 4.3GHz, 32GB RAM (3200 clocks), SSD for system and data partitions), Rendering same object (small partcount models, but with reflective materials and some lightsources etc) in a FullHD resolution with High Sample Rate in the Eyesight render on the GPUs:

• CPU computation: 15-20 Minutes
• Old Geforce GTX1050 (2 GB VRAM): 12-15 minutes per image
• Current Geforce RTX3060 (12GB VRAM): ~4 minutes per image

Hope that somehow helps as a starting point - if others tell their render times, I reckon it would also be very benefitial to have the specs of the system given.

RAM or VRAM isn't giving the huge increase inbetween the graphicscards, it is more a thing of their new generations having a multitude of faster working computing units, the 2 GB VRAM on the old graphicscard were never a limitation for my renders - RAM / VRAM may get a topic to be concerned for real huge models with tens of tousands of parts to be loaded into the renderer.

Another general thing I recognized to have a little speed up: Setting the task priority for the running eyesight.exe from normal to "Higher priority" in the windows task manager seems to enable the Windows Kernel / resource Schedulers to give it a little more throughput, but this may result in lag of other running applications (watching videos in the browser for e.g.).

Edited July 7, 2023 by aFrInaTi0n

[SylvainLS]

Pro-tip: Black renders faster than White. (Same model, same parameters, almost all the model in one colour: White = 100%, Yellow = 94%, Red = 90%, Blue = 89%, Black = 87%.)

I haven’t tried in Rubber Black but that should be even faster… but then, I’m not sure we’d really see anything 

Another thing: exporting to DAE can be very long (minutes) for big models, so it may be faster to do a Rotation animation with 4 images (4x png, not a mov/gif) than to take 2 or 3 pics around the model.  I mean, when you just want to see what it’d look like, not for a final render.

Lastly: yep, the render is faster if you leave the computer alone.  Usain Bolt is also faster when he doesn’t stop to sign autographs along the way… well, with him, you never know, but for renders, that’s certain 

[Mylenium]

22 hours ago, Sentinel said:

I trying to make an animated render for a ~200 part build, and it says it’s going to take 3+ hours, should it take that long?

Based on so little information there is no point to even guess. Number of frames, complexity of the models, materials, sampling settings, lighting, output resolution, the computer's specsand a ton of other factors influence this. I mean just for perspective I started out doing 3D when rendering a simple sphere took several minutes in the most crappy quality... Rendering a reasonably complex model taking a bunch of time is perfectly normal even on the most powerful computer. anyway, you have to be much more specific and provide info about all your settings and a screenshot of the scene before anyone can assess whether your render times are within normal expectations or excessive and from there on can advise on optimizations.

Mylenium